Editor's Review

GIMP is a powerful distributed program for photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. Comparisons to Photoshop abound simply because GIMP is its most laudable free alternative. Yet, putting aside any impersonations, GIMP truly stands on its own. Like any powerful program, GIMP takes time to master but once you familiarize yourself with its tools, simple tasks take mere minutes. GIMP is a smart solution to more expensive programs that may yield less favorable results.

GIMP at a Glance

It was easy to download and launch GIMP, which isn’t surprising because of its maturity. GIMP opens to a three-part UI. The left dialog contains GIMP’s tools, while the right dialog contains its Layers, Channels, Paths, and Brushes. The center holds GIMP’s main image editing area, which you can make full screen with docking dialogs. And you can add tabs to any dialog box to help you keep the all the features you need close at hand!

Product Details

GIMP is a versatile graphics tool and with some sophisticated built-in features such as:

Customizable Interface—GIMP allows you to customize its views and behaviors. For example, you can change widget theme colors, spacing, and icon sizes, plus custom toolbox sets.

Photo Enhancement—Digital photo imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP. Corrective mode in the transform tools helps you fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt and a channel mixer affords you the flexibility you need with B&W photography.

Digital Retouching—GIMP is ideal for advanced photo retouching. For example, you can remove unwanted details with the clone tool or use the new healing tool to make quick fixes of minor issues like a botched brush stroke.

Hardware Support—GIMP includes support for various input devices, such as USB controllers, MIDI controllers, and pressure and tilt sensitive tablets. You can change brush properties while you paint and you can bind your favorite scripts to buttons to speed your workflow!

Quick Specs

Screenshots

Description

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Use GIMP as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible; it can be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Gimp on OSX is pretty good. Not as current as the Windows version, but it still gets the job done. The UI needs work, Single Window mode should be default on all systems, but other than that everything is there. To those Photoshop who can't figure out how to export as a jpg, pdf, it's in File -> Export. Next time look a little closer. If you're used to Photoshop, GIMP's tool placement might throw you off, but it's easy to get used to.

Posted 02/06/2014

drlex

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Note: version 2.8.14p2 is pretty much unusable, it crashes about 50% of the time when opening an image (this includes effects that spawn new image windows), and it also sometimes crashes while trying to save. Use 2.8.14p1 instead.
As far as free bitmap-based graphics editors go, GIMP is probably the best. It has some very powerful tools that are not even available in other programs. The main problem however is the user interface, which has always been somewhat backwards compared to every other graphics editor. It has not improved in the 2.8 release, maybe even to the contrary.
Working with GIMP often gives me a feeling of having to take everything out of my toolbox just to reach that single wrench I need. For operations that take a single click in Photoshop, I have to click three times and press a key. The right window must be in focus and the editor must be in the right mode, otherwise operations either have no effect or do something unexpected. To make things worse, the current version of OS X Gimp has a few bugs in the toolbox interface that cause the tools to randomly switch to other modes. This happens quite often, and is only noticed when the tools do not behave as expected, because the only visual indication is a highlight change on a small icon.
My verdict: if you don't mind wrestling a pig from time to time, GIMP is a great free alternative to expensive editors.

Posted 01/26/2014

phaze12

1 of 52 of 53 of 54 of 55 of 5

This version, 2.8.6p1, seems a bit faster than the previous OS X-native version of Gimp I've tried, 2.8.4
I'm fairly excited about the OS X-native Gimp project and will keep trying the updates..this is is an application I feel *everyone* who does any level of image manipulation on Mac should use and be interested in.

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